


And the Sky Tonight is Luminous

by Aloice



Category: Final Fantasy XIII-2
Genre: Alyssa POV, Based on Alyssa and Hope's final encounter in 4xx AF Augusta Tower, F/M, Gen, Heavily referencing Hope and Alyssa's Fragments After aka Hope's scrapped DLC, Heavy Angst, aka when Alyssa disappears in the main timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 15:00:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11923365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloice/pseuds/Aloice
Summary: (For All the Wrong Reasons)One sided Hope/Alyssa, probably AUish, another take on Alyssa's betrayal and the ghosts of Augusta Tower.





	And the Sky Tonight is Luminous

**Author's Note:**

> Written to Jennifer Damiano's "If the World Should End" (the last stanza is... particularly heartbreaking if you consider Alyssa's canvas of prayers quest in LR), Sleeping at Last's cover of "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" and (ironically) Gary Jules' "Mad World". Probably a companion piece to Hope and Legacy's Augusta Tower chapter, which will be written in Hope's POV.

The world  _vibrates_ , shakes you loose as you crudely shove the gun against his back. He crumbles a little at the touch of cold steel, his proud, ever persistent head dipping just an inch, and your resolve falters, if only for a millisecond.

You don’t ask for his forgiveness; that’s never what you wanted from him. In another universe time is turned on its head and it’s you on the ground and him with everything to lose, him with the anger and despair and craving for the world’s air. In another world he’s the one pulling the trigger. In another world he’s the one who disappears.

In another world, he’s the one murdering the love of his life to keep that same love alive.

 

You had been everywhere: Palumpolum, Bodhum, Eden, Bresha, Yaschas, Academia. Everywhere you had been happy, smiling at every winding stair and gawking man. Everywhere you had striven to let the world make its mark on you while you made your own mark in return.

Everywhere you had painted over with gloss lipstick and kissed goodbye with lies.

It had been the real question of the time capsule: what were you really chasing, if you didn’t even know what your own heart was like? Life for its own sake did not make sense; you might as well have been an animal, a replicating bacterium, or an irrational number, winding and wandering without end. You couldn’t remember your parents. You couldn’t remember your friends. You couldn’t even remember Nena, besides that she had seemed a mirror of you that lived while you died. You were a fault without a resolution, a paradox without an anchor - 

A vision: Hope knocking on your door, smiling as widely as his fucking huge heart would allow him. The golden armband on his wrist beat ceaselessly with his pulse, swept the fall of Cocoon and humanity making its desperate stand. He was shooting through time and fate like a meteor crashing through the atmosphere, burning up crystal and death and dreams wanting to come alive, and you - 

You just couldn’t bear to let that light leave you behind.

 

One of the few things you  _did_  know with a fair degree of certainty was your hatred for the Pulse l’Cie; they had robbed you of your world and life, and even centuries later Serah and Hope were still bleeding years from your lifespan, chipping away small pieces of what allowed Alyssa Zaidelle to cling onto existence with every new artifact and design. Before the revelation finally came, you often fumed about Hope’s divine gifts and human intellect, furious at how the gods were literally twisting timelines to allow him to live while it had absolutely no qualms about your death.

You wondered why you couldn’t hate him as much as you yearned to hate him ( _it’d be so easy, just set up an accident or command a duplicate to twist his own tie around his neck_ ) but then you simply stumbled upon that old Palumpolum tape. There had been but a sea of chaos, one silent act, his crushed but resolute eyes as he carefully lay the carbuncle doll down on the rack –

You spent the next few hours staring at a terrible screenshot of fourteen year old Hope Estheim as he gazed at you back.

 

You wanted to ask, on the way to Augusta Tower:  _when you made the decision to charge straight into Orphan’s Cradle, did you know you were going to bring Cocoon down?_

_After all that was said and done, did you ever figure out how many had died in Palumpolum alone?_

You thought you heard his breath hitch as he noticed your bloodstains on the floor.

He didn’t weep as he deleted your duplicates, but visibly flinched all the same, taking a second after each one to regain his composure. With every dodge and dive his eyes grew a bit wilder, his hands a touch more unsteady – but despite everything, he still continued to edge forward, his brows set in a hard line as he typed commands into the mainframe drive. A fire yet burned in his chest. He thought he could save you tonight.

You had been practicing deleting his duplicates for thirteen whole nights.

 

He disabled one of your screens faster than you expected, silencing a duplicate before she could open her mouth and speak to him in your voice. Despite the absolute non-difference in your ages, Hope had always been better than you in everything.

The disembodied code, left uncompiled and sorely unsaid:

_You had done a terrible thing, Hope Estheim. You had inspired me to overreach._

If you had just been human, then perhaps you wouldn’t have dreamed of fighting the impossible; would have resigned yourself to the design of the gods, would never have bothered to try to prevent Cocoon’s fall several centuries after your own death. Being human was easy. Being resentful and hateful was always in your nature. Challenging the timeline to preserve the integrity of your own mind and wanting to make sure that someone would _never_ forget you - now _that_ was ambitious.

Through the lens of your spying camera, Hope _glowed_ with conviction - the conviction of all of humanity determined to survive and move forward despite all the collateral damage, you were sure - and you imagined the weight of his body in your arms, the light going out of his sea green eyes even as it suffused the room with its sweetness. _I love you and hate you in the same breath._  He was the last thing you should overreach for; he dwelled on a whole other plane of existence, the beloved child of this lonely universe. Entire civilizations and planets revolved around his heartbeat and pledged themselves to his existence, swore by him as their creator and constant, but you, the human girl resurrected from death just to be brutally erased again - you just wanted him to be  _yours_.

If he would remember you, then it didn’t matter if he was alive or dead. And if you knew, deep down, that the living Hope Estheim would never choose you over his guiding Light, as much as he would hurt and pretend otherwise –

_Hey, senpai. How does it feel, chasing after a soul that has to die for the world to survive?_

The most unfunny joke in the universe: Hope Estheim’s name. _Hope_ , not wish. _Estheim_ , not homeless. The man will tear down more than the sky to create a world for those he loves, and for so long you had longed to find a glimmer of light for yourself in his mind.

_I wish you would kiss me, for those you love will never die…_

Or perhaps you didn’t even go that far. You just craved the strength in his arm, the optimism in his smile, the never-failing empathy that always – and not even intentionally – put your cynicism to shame. He was everything you were not and hopelessly intoxicating just because of that. Carpe diem, the light of tomorrow, the joy of surviving impossible odds to embrace the sky, the limitless power of what the human mind could achieve – his sermons were all poison to your ears, yet the thoughts had become addictive. Only a few years into your assistantship you had been forced to admit that Hope Estheim deserved all the love that the universe had lavished onto him: if you had to pick someone to receive all the privileges, name someone who simply _had_ to be saved across every single timeline, you’d protect him, every single fucking time.

The caveat: that didn’t make anything any _easier_.

Caius had laughed at you when you approached him in your dream. It had hurt to realize just how powerless you were against him, how cosmically insignificant your soul had seemed against the weight of the heart of chaos – but it had hurt more to read about him in your research, see with your own eyes the mirage of the lovely seeress in those violet irises. No; while Hope Estheim was just as cosmically important as Paddra Nsu-Yeul, you were nowhere as worthy as Caius Ballad to be a lover or guardian. While Caius was willing to give up his life so that Yeul would live, you were desperate enough to give up Hope so that you would have met.

The worst part: Caius _understood_.

_Sacrifice his life, and your meeting would never be lost to dreams._

_There has to be a way_ , you argued futilely, standing up to the immortal as an ant would to an oak. He loomed with the gravitas of time and all human history: to him, four hundred years had passed in the blink of an eye. _He will figure out a way to save me. I know he can. I know he will try. He cares for me. He – he won’t just stand there and let me die._

_Ah, but all of you can be gone in the flash of an instant. Why would he fight for something he can’t remember? Why do you simply assume that you matter? You are a paradox, brought about by Etro’s folly. We can only manipulate time with the nature of our minds. It’s in his nature to bring anomalies back into line. It is in his nature to reject you._

Caius’ laughter haunted you all the way from Palumpolum to Academia.

_I know love, little girl. I know loss just as well as you. There’s only one thing you can do._

You covered your dream-ears with dream-hands, pleaded with your dream-voice for someone to unplug your time capsule and save you from your screams. They didn’t stop. They are in your head, even now. Augusta Tower is crawling with their ghosts.

_Carve your name into his bones._

 

“Make me proud,” you tell every single one of your duplicates, even though they’re all insubstantial masses of code who cannot process human voice. “Kill him before he gets to me.”

You conveniently neglect to mention that they’ve all been programmed to do the exact opposite.

 

As much as you’ve practiced – as much as you’ve always _wanted_ that one facet of honesty, that one feeble attempt to face the truth of your actions here at the very end – you still couldn’t shoot him face to face, so you had come up behind him instead.

That last look on the camera – his uniform had been stained with your blood, his features distorted and frantic. Yet here – here as your trembling fingers wrap around the trigger and you can both taste the pungent smell of gunpowder in a room full of moonlight – he relaxes, _exhales_ , and ( _for no goddamned good reason_ ) gives in.

He doesn’t make an attempt to dodge the bullet you bury in his heart (because it’s the real you.)

The bullet never pierces his skin anyway (because it’s the real him.)

The tears fall freely at last, a curtain of rain. They don’t drown or weigh you down: you sublimate. He reaches for you with pale ungloved fingers and feels only the emptiness of air. The spring in his eyes falters, the past four hundred years rewinding past them all in an instant, affection, fear and regret all intermingling to draw out a wish for you to stay. You can’t fulfill or obey.

 _Hope_? You whisper, ( _plead, think, desire_.) His pale irises are liquid like Bodhum’s waves and Academia’s music fountains, the human focus of your heartache. He listens. Your world dissolves without fury. _Even though it’ll be as if I never existed… If you remember me even just a little, then…_

Fear overwhelms, but relief does, too. He falls soundlessly to his knees before you and cups the invisible edges of your jaw, and belatedly you realize – in that moment, for the first time – that you’re grateful that you’ve failed. That he’ll go on. That he’ll live and forget. That the world will not end…

_At least I’ve been able to look at you again, for this one final time. At least I’ve been able to meet you. At least…_

The luminosity under the sky fades

(sings)

like the wind.


End file.
